Kayla Pierce

Kayla Pierce is a third-year sociology student and Presidential Fellow conducting research in group processes, identities, and emotions.

Sociology is rich with practical applications that individuals can use to promote equality, strengthen families, and improve relationships. However, most people are unfamiliar with sociologists, what they research, and how their research is applicable to everyday life. Furthermore, research findings are often buried in inaccessible academic journals and never reach the people they were intended to help.

Kayla’s goal for her SRR project is to repackage sociological principles in a way that is accessible and useful to people outside academia. Drawing from her own work and the work of other scholars, she will write and disseminate articles, rich with science-based personal applications, to non-academic sources such as the Science of Us and Psychology Today.

Her strategy will be to select exciting new research articles published in the top journals in the discipline and write accessible articles that are both intriguing, beneficial, and practical for everyday application, being especially sensitive to topics that are hot in the media at that particular time.

While Kayla’s goal is to reach and impact a broad audience with sociological knowledge, she will also develop questions that are beneficial for teaching at the high school and college level.

In the future, Kayla would like to extend her project to include videos with engaging graphics that can easily be disseminated and consumed on social media. Her overarching goal is to connect the work of sociologists to the people sociological research was designed to investigate and benefit.